


And In My Most Beautiful Moment

by cormac



Category: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream - Harlan Ellison
Genre: Body Horror, Deviates From Canon, Gen, I'm Bad At Tagging, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Slow Build, Ted/Ellen, Ted/OC, Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:22:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27118148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cormac/pseuds/cormac
Summary: Chronicles the years leading up to the end of the world and the years after the end of the world through the eyes of Ted -- his fears, regrets, and scarce joys. It is the beginning of the new era, a bleak and despairing era, the era of AM.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	1. OPPENHEIMER

**Author's Note:**

> Wanted to expand on the original story a bit by talking about Ted and co.'s lives before Armageddon, and post-canon events.

_Here we stand_  
Like an Adam and an Eve  
Waterfalls  
Garden of Eden 

Dear Ellen,

I am dreaming about the end of the world, again.

Beside me, I am vaguely conscious of Mira who cringes away from the slow and spreading pool of sweat under me, a saline silhouette time-lapse of my motions. I am on the thin film between sleep and lucidity, and I see enough of my dream to know that is it Him, again. 

He, The Pilgrim, has been with me for my entire life. I see him in my dreams: a faceless smear of a man ... sometimes not-so-much a man ... for reasons unknown I cannot bring my gaze to meet his, and something inside of me is certain that if I do, I will never be able to escape. From what, I don't know, but I follow my gut instinct, which cowers and roils in his presence like an abused dog throwing itself against its cage. (Let me out! Let me out!) His shoes are anonymous and ill-defined, Rene Magritte loafers. My father had liked fine art and he would bring me to museums and galleries around the world. When I saw Magritte's _The Pilgrim_ , I couldn't sleep afterwards for days. I remember the crowd behind me, trying to catch a glimpse of the Surrealist masterpiece of the twenty-first century, I remember their breath on the back of my neck, their eager hands, the clicking of shutters ... 

Instead of darkness when I closed my eyes, there was always The Pilgrim. His face entirely cleaved from his head. That vacant smile that had first seemed benign to me, then corporate, then a vicious parody of the world I found myself in, an empty face, a toothless black when he opened his mouth like there was nothing inside him but the absence of matter. Slowly, that chthonic inkwell despair crawls toward me.

A pool of spreading blood. The Pilgrim smiles wider. More black floods out of his mouth, then his eyes, then his ears. I am chained to the ground, I am paralyzed, and The Pilgrim only looks at me with the eyes of a hateful apex predator. I try to jerk away and I only hit my head on the concrete floor. The Pilgrim laughs, and that grating peal floods my ear canals, burrows into my mind. His laugh, it taints me.

Closer, closer. I am jittering, struggling, wailing mutely. My facial muscles have never been contorted in this way before. I see red and orange and white bloom across the flat surface of that black pool. The Pilgrim whispers in my ear. 

Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer. 

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

I AM BECOME DEATH, THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS.

_listen to me, ted. i rip apart atoms. the bonds have enough energy stored to kill millions, billions. i turn your organs black and gangrenous. on the outside, you will look just fine for perhaps a few days, but you will be rotting down to slurry inside ... then your skin will start to burn and peel, your eyes scar over, they burst, they trickle down the sides of your ruined temples, pockmarked and barely human ... but you will not die. you will not die. and neither will anybody else. look outside, ted. imagine. no more blue skies. funny, right?_

I wake up. A shallow depression in the mattress where Mira has left. I stumble downstairs to the living room and she is sitting on the sofa, coiled and accusatory. But her voice is soft, and that is almost as unbearable as The Pilgrim's writhing laughter. My mind supplies me with a split-second illusion: Mira, beheaded, Mira, wearing that navy Magritte suit, two sizes too big ...

"This can't go on, Ted."

I sit on the loveseat that faces the sofa. No, I _deflate_. "Can't we talk about this? _Please_ , Mira."

"This can't go on. You need help."

"Mira, please—"

"—This can't go—"

"—please! Mira! PLEASE!"

I've won. I've won, for now. Relief floods through me at the same time as guilt. She turns away from me so I only see the curve of her cheek, the shelf of her brow, which I can tell is furrowed. From the way her hand is placed over her face, she's chewing her nails. It's such a human gesture, such a _Mira_ gesture. I cling onto that motion even as she stands up and walks, slow and resentful, back to the bedroom, still picking at her nails. I can hear her footsteps just above me, and the bedsprings wail when she settles in.

\--

Mira wants me to go to therapy. In truth, I've gone countless times. I've memorized their questions:

How are you?

Have you had difficulty completing tasks in the past few weeks or months?

Have you been eating too much or too little in the past few weeks or months?

Do you feel physically incapacitated on some days?

Do you sometimes feel as if a great weight is sitting on your chest, preventing you from breathing?

But I can't tell them about The Pilgrim. He has started to creep into my waking hours. I was working late. He stood in a dark corner of the office just across from my cubicle. I was ready to pack up and go home for the night when my coworker tapped me on the shoulder and whispered:

"Ted. I think that man wants to talk to you. He's been waiting a bit."

I turned around. Ellen, when I tell you that my blood ran _cold_. Liquid nitrogen, cryonics, zero degree Kelvin -- there is no word for it. There he was, that terrible floating head, disembodied and bland ... have I told you how mundane he looks, aside from his face? From far away, he looks like every other man in the world, and perhaps that is one of the most terrifying parts of him, that he may be watching me at all times. That other people don't see him the way I do -- then, what other conclusion could be drawn aside from the fact I am well and truly insane?

Did I tell you, Ellen, that my father died from early-onset Alzheimers when I was 22? Plaques in my brain, The Pilgrim, those terrible atom bombs ... do you understand, now, why I thought what I thought?

He didn't show up again, for a long while. I went to church for the first time in my life since I've been baptized. The pastor, his name was Reverend Land. I couldn't tell him about The Pilgrim, but did tell him about everything else: the degenerative disorders, the apocalyptic dreaming, how the whole world was holding its breath as the face of nuclear war was turning, turning, turning toward us. Me, I was tired of holding my breath. No, I couldn't hold any longer. I've been told that after 4 minutes without oxygen, the brain cells begin to necrose, and they cannot be revived again. Well, imagine having to hold your breath for 4 years. 4 generations. Did you know that a single drop of odorless, colorless Sarin gas can kill a whole room full of men? I grew up in a sick world, Ellen. You did too, and so did all the rest of you. Do you understand, now, why I think therapy's a fucking joke?

... I apologize for my language. But it must be said.

It was when I tried to tell Mira this, that she left me. Don't feel bad for me. It was going to happen, sooner or later. I'll spare you the details.

I walk inside the church. Outside, there's a sign hastily stenciled with the words: "ATOMICS" ANONYMOUS. A truck blares down the road, reminding us of air-raid procedure. As if we wouldn't be immediately vaporized or burned beyond recognition. I appreciate human optimism, I really do. But god, isn't it the saddest thing in the world? 

It's a small church, headed by a local Korean-American community. Reverend Land was born and bred in Pennsylvania. I suppose now he's long since returned to the earth, carbon and nitrogen and oxygen, all that, returning back to the primordial soup from whence he came. I shook his hand, looked into his sunken blue eyes. His nose is pinched and red from his glasses, but he's not wearing them.

"You're here for AA?" He asks. He's a smoker.

"Yes."

The vaulted ceilings disappear into darkness. Not for the first time, I start sweating in fear of The Pilgrim. Paranoid and neurotic, that was me. You know, some things never change, just as sure as how two hydrogens and one oxygen arranged just so create water. AM, who toys with elements and atoms and molecules like children's building blocks, can't even change that. To think the molecular structure of water -- water! -- provided me with more strength and security than Jesus Christ. 

We sit in a circle, in front of the altar at the crossing. I remember the chairs were like lacquered brown skeletons. There are only three of us, including me and Reverend Land. This is where I met you, Ellen. Remember, you and your yellow cardigan? You'd spilled coffee on it, and you were trying very hard to sit in a way where your crossed arms covered the brown stain, your hands clenched around a styrofoam cup.

"Why are you here?" Reverend Land.

I wait for you to respond, but you don't answer. You're not even looking at us. So I go ahead. "I can't sleep."

"Why? Bad dreams, insomnia ...?"

"A bit of both. I mean, we're always like what. A week? Away from nuclear war?"

"How could you say that?" This was you. You were furious, I was blown away, Reverend Land might've been amused. I'm not sure.

"I— I mean, it's the truth."

"I came here to feel better, asshole. To feel BETTER."

Reverend Land starts, but you're already gone. As you storm down the aisle I catch a glimpse of the coffee stain as your cardigan opens and flutters in the wind that rushes through the open doors. 

We can't have done a support group with only two people, so I leave.

And remember, remember how you were still standing in front of the church? You were so sorry. I was so sorry. And I was so sure that I'd never see you again. 

Now you're here. We are in a dark, damp nowhere. It could be the inside of some massive beast, it could be that we are buried thirty feet deep under rubble which is bowing under its own weight and will slowly press us down, suffocate us, millimeter by millimeter. It could be that... I don't know. I can't think. Instead, I turn to you. 

Your face is shiny and blind with fear, sweat, panic. It's the only part I can see of you, and for that I am grateful. I want to reach out to you in the dim light, but AM has turned all my limbs into rotting stumps. I trail a gritty black nicotine smear behind me. Your head whips around, straining at the full range of articulation. I used to know what that was. I was a paramedic. At least I think I was. Mr. Pilgrim, I can hear him. I can hear his footsteps, drawing closer and closer. You ever notice how weird he walks? One and-a-two, one and-a-two. Syncopated, dragging then rushing. This is partly the reason why I can't stand listening to jazz anymore. One and-a-two, one and-a-two. Is the bastard skipping everywhere he goes? It makes me sick. 

"Mira..." I croak out. I don't even recognize my own voice.

You don't respond. Of course you don't. I realize my mistake, and I scream.

Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer. I'll kill you, I'll kill you, I'll kill you.

\--

Ellen is trying to tell me a story. She paws at me but I’m not there.

Her liquid brown eyes glint in the semi-dark. Doe-like. I remember once when I hit a deer going 105 on the freeway. All I saw before impact was the whites of its eyes, marbled red with bulging veins as its organs were pulverized in slow-motion, flesh-and-blood against the metal grille of my roaring SUV. Spittle flies from its mouth, caught in the brilliant headlights. Then it’s over. Then I’m rushing past it, my engine wailing. I can’t help but think of Ellen in the place of that deer, her body ruined, rendered into the consistency of egg-whites, but no sign of bleeding anywhere. All of it on the inside.

From far away, The Pilgrim giggles. I know he finds it amusing when I fall into rabbit holes which my mind so eagerly provides. Living here – if that word can be used – for so long has corroded through my brain in complex subterranean tunnels I can’t escape out of.

“Ted. Listen.”

“Shh. Gorrister. He’s sleeping.”

“Who cares about Gorrister?”

“Stop that.”

“Ted.”

“Ellen, I said stop that.”

I close my eyes. I’m back inside my own head again. I can feel AM inside, his fingers hovering over a control panel matrix of buttons. This one causes indescribable agony. This one makes me feel like I’m doing my Reconciliation again in the hot cramped confessional and the mouth-breathing priest. This one will truly break me. I’m not sure exactly what it does, but I know that AM is saving it for later. Before I would’ve been wracked with sweat and anticipation at just the mere suggestion of that button. He’s taunted me with it. Now, I can’t bring myself to care anymore.

But that’s the thing about us humans, AM. We see what we want to see.

_hi, ted._

His voice is coy and echoes through my mental corridors. I feel like a kid in the hallways after the school has been closed, all the lights turned off. The combination of that robotic voice and vocal fry makes me nauseous, and I sway on my feet.

_how are you feeling? you comfortable?_

I feel sick, AM. I feel like a petri dish being choked by blooming cultures of bacteria. A corpse ridden with rot and maggots. A dishrag of ominous dark stains. I feel like I’ll never be clean again, AM.

He giggles.

Back when I was in med school, AM, we were taught how to wash our hands. For no less than twenty seconds, we ran our hands under a lukewarm faucet, lathered up with soap. We rubbed our palms, intertwined our fingers, paid special attention to our wrists and thumbs. We turned the faucet off with an elbow. It was especially tense, then, because a little boy had recently died of a central line infection, and if someone felt like you hadn’t washed your hands for long enough, it would be like you killed him.

A lot of things went on in that hospital. I had a colleague who kept leaving behind scalpels before sewing up patients after a surgery. There were at least ten people out there who, if they were fortunate, were stopped by a metal detector at the airport security check-in, or died a gruesome death inside the bowel of a CAT scanner.

AM brightens. He’s drawn another idea out of me. The Pilgrim. AM. Ellen had called him Dad.

Funny thing is, that Ellen’s dad had died when she was only a baby. AM would pace around the outside of her closed bedroom door. Through the little slit between the door and the carpet, she saw his shadow walking back and forth. When she went to open the door, whoever cast the shadow was gone.

In the first few months when we were imprisoned here, we’d talked about how AM had shown up in our lives.

Ellen and I, we were the only ones that saw him when we were kids. I admit that among all the human waste and human suffering, we did feel a little in-group superiority because of that. I realize now how pathetic that is, but aren’t we all pathetic? That word has lost all meaning in this singularity. Just looking at the back of my ruined hand brings me to tears, looking at its violent topology, the web of scars and scabs and welts. There’s not a single square inch of me that isn’t oozing lymph except for my face. My stomach may be scored by ulcers, my liver diseased and yellow, but the brain inside my skull is still intact.

I open my eyes. Ellen has fallen asleep. I stroke her head and stare at the straight part in her hair where I can see her scalp, which is much yellower and paler than the rest of her. I swear I can feel AM, pulsing, biding his time, just beneath the inch of skin and bone.

Yes, AM, I am comfortable. I am comfortable that I am the only sane one here.

Gorrister speaks up. His voice is brittle but intense. “In my past life, I was a poet.”

“Wait, no, I was a doctor. A bondsman. No …”

“Go back to sleep, Gorrister. You’re confused. Those were my jobs.” Chasing memories is humiliating. I always feel like a creature that’s been reduced to such base desperation to eat its own waste.

“No, Ted, I was something …”

“My god. How many times have we had this conversation? Look, it doesn’t matter anymore, does it?”

“No … I think I was one of the engineers who built the atom bomb …”

“Go to sleep, Gorrister.”

“It was just my job.”

“Goddamn it, then build us something to—!” To get us out of here? I can’t even say it. Can’t even imagine it. I crumple in on myself.

“Wait, Ted. I’m sure I must’ve been a poet …”

“Hurrah,” I mutter. Then I laugh, a quick, wild bark. It’s less of a laugh then some biological impulse that surges up inside of me and if I don’t let it out, my spinal cord will deglove.

Ellen stirs. I stroke her head; she falls asleep again. Her insides might’ve been all used up – worn out and stained with all the other times they’ve had sex with her – but on the outside, at least, the top of her head, was still full, still young.

I turn to the side. October sunlight is lasering a hole through the mullioned window into my eyes. White-hot. I concentrate all the energy I have left into a point inside of myself, and let it expand: LEAVE!

AM, The Pilgrim, does not move an inch.

He settles over me like a vulture. His bony knees push roughly against my xylophone ribcage and I see stars. The nerves are screaming, or I am screaming, or both. He reaches out with a gloved hand (black leather, I can tell because of the noise and the texture), his pointer finger and thumb make a neat arc around my trachea. My Adam’s apple shoots up, but it can’t come down again. If I gag, if I wheeze, he will choke me. I wonder how I look to him. I had been on the brochure of an Ivy League college, once. Princeton. I had a girlfriend in college who was studying astrophysics. She saw the moon landing and it changed her life just as Magritte’s painting changed mine.

Where am I? Away from Ellen and Gorrister, who are drifting off to sleep on the other side of this wretched world. Here, it is violent daytime. At first I think I’ve gone blind like Benny, and I don’t know how to feel about it but I settle on being thankful. But the black spots swim away to reveal an adderall-blue sky. As blue as thallium burning. Floaters drift across my vision, massive translucent eldritch monsters.

Just a few moments ago, I was languishing somewhere dark and Amazon-moist, sweating and being broiled from the inside. My pupils scream with the exertion of dilating. A shadow falls over me.

The Pilgrim.

No, it’s a surgeon. The light wasn’t from a blue sky after all, but a surgical lighthead. I can hear it now – the monotonous _beep, beep, beep_ of the heart rate monitor behind me. Its robotic tone, the metallic shine of the screen, they’re all part of some future Pavlovian conditioning that makes my mouth dry and my stomach tighten. Deja vu – my heartbeat accelerates. I’m sure you understand this well, Ellen.

Slowly, I pull away from the anesthesia. The surgeon tells me through his mask:

“It went well, Ted.”

It is October 23rd, 1979. We are toeing the edge of a new millennium and my appendix is on a stainless steel tray beside me, wet and red.

Ellen, the drive home has always depressed me. I’m sitting in the driver’s seat next to Mira, whose face is drawn and gray.

“AM, why?” I murmur, without meaning to. On my wrist I still have the hospital bracelet. 

“Who’s AM?” Mira says, sharply, as she turns a corner so violently I’m afraid the car will tip over, and we will die in a fiery accident.

“Nothing.”

The rest of the ride is tense and unhappy. The engine hiccups once, twice, as we pull into the roundabout of our desolate suburban neighborhood. Thrice, as we back into our driveway. Is it just me, or is everything grayer now? Our apartment is a Constructivist monolith which seems like it came, ironically, right out of Soviet Russia.

I am dreading the elevator ride up so much that I am tempted to break away and dash up the stairs, but we live on the twentieth floor, and I am still weak from my appendectomy. My fingers gingerly trace the scar on my torso. Mira notices this – if possible, her frown grows deeper.

She came from a family of money, you know. Mira. So it was I, whose father was a blue-collar salt-of-the-earth worker, it was I who barged into her life with my lowly cheap suit and stole her from a gleaming socialite’s future. Me and my wannabe imitation alligator skin suitcase. It was I who robbed her of her beauty, her luxuries, her favorite Victorian oak chiffonier that didn’t fit through the door of the apartment. Yes, I ate that chiffonier for breakfast, I cut it with a fork and steak knife and didn’t use an oyster spoon to eat the drawer knobs. 

It’s been weeks since we slept together. She sleeps on the couch because of my nightmares, but I’m sure that she’s grateful to finally have an excuse. 

I settle into bed. I turn over.


	2. APPENDICITIS

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> AM bullies Ted and Ellen for a bit. Mira tells Ted about a funny dream. More than 109 years ago, Ted meets Gorrister. And Mira finally does the inevitable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shorter chapter, been pretty busy lately. A bit of Gorrister backstory for you. Always open for feedback!

I remember when I was little I used to sit up at night and listen to the city through the radio. I would hear the mutters of police talking code, the weatherman and his wry voice proclaiming another April day of rain, independent stations asking for and receiving relationship advice, Spanish and Italian and Polish, all through until dawn so that I didn't know which sort of stuff I'd dreamt up and which sort of stuff I'd actually heard as I stared at the stucco ceiling, early morning purples being washed over by some distant car's headlights.

AM, The Pilgrim, AM, he takes memories like this and feeds them back into my head. Instead of hearing -- I don't know, stories about someone's lost dog, an exotic pet wildcat on the loose -- I hear you, Ellen, and all the others. I know how you think about me, and how you feel about me. You guys can't stop talking about me, and somehow I'm not surprised. Don't worry, no hard feelings. If I were you and you were me then I'd be doing the same. 

You might scoff and roll your eyes and ask me how can I be so gullible? Well, it's fact now Ellen. There's no use in lying because I know and I've always known. Poor Ellen. Poor Nimdok. Poor Benny and Gorrister. AM is playing you guys like his own quartet of fiddles. 

It's been maybe three minutes, three months, since AM has let us out from that terrible subterranean womb, but we're lying here slack and dumb like ragdolls. I'm here comforting myself thinking about entropy and the heat-death of the universe, and how eventually this entropy will start eating up AM more and more from the inside. I've never seen a God that can escape the laws of thermodynamics, not even the God from the Bible, because who's going to be able to worship Him if we're all flung about, cold and black in deep space? I use up all and more of my energy to turn my head and look at you. Your eyes are blank, your hand twisted in a way that your wrist juts out at me, the bone pale just under your skin. Sweat rolls down from my hairline horizontal through my eyes. It's all the same, and somewhere high above us AM peals a laugh that jumps from arpeggio to arpeggio, Locrian to Ionian, jazz to Americana to electronic and back again. 

"What's so funny?" I demand, then I scream because I've just raised my hand and it's melting. I bring my hand up to my cheek -- melting too -- everything a puddle of wax, paraffin, me and Ellen two chemical puddings on some desolate First World War style wasteland complete with a torn flag on the horizon, not a flag I recognize, another of AM's practical jokes, the flag and the melting, his laughter, Ellen's soft moaning as her twisted hand becomes contourless, non-Newtonian --

We run down, rivulets of flesh, into a trench. I can't stop myself. Molecule after molecule I'm dragged down into mud and what I see is what looks like a pair of some petrified exotic fruit before I realize that they're grenades, and I don't even have time to feel fear before -- BANG! the world turns white-hot and suddenly I am vapor, misting through the wind like a sneeze, unimaginable pain --

Ellen, you're beside me in a spray of liquid and air as we hurtle through empty space, a loud _snap_ and we're whole again, energy equals mass times the speed of light squared ticking dim through my brain as we land hard on the ground. It doesn't matter where we are. For miles around it's the same thing, a seamless repeat of the same English trench one of us might've studied in school. AM's science fair experiment has ended. I don't know where they came from but I see Nimdok, Benny, Gorrister, crowding around us looking down like bewildered hyenas. 

Gorrister goes first: "Oh, God. Are you all okay?"

You speak, properly speak, for the first time in a while, and I'm struck by jealousy and anger. You hadn't said a word to me all this time and yet you were so freely conversing with Gorrister, that skinny sad soulless piece of shit, why him and not me, Ellen? Why him and not me?

Anyways, you said something to the effect of: "As okay as I'll ever be, I guess," and smiled sadly. That made me feel a little better but then Gorrister smiled sadly back and suddenly I had lit coals in my stomach that were smoldering and perforating through the lining, peritoneum, duodenum, I don't know and I don't care. All I know is that I can't trust anyone right now so I stand up, shaking like a newborn deer but still standing, and walk away. 

I hear you try to call me back, "Ted, what're you doing? It's dangerous!" and I'm really resisting the urge to scream back because where the hell is _safe_ , Ellen? And when I look back after walking for a few seconds, you're holding hands with Benny again, who I can't really see clearly from here but I know he's just aching to take you in bed tonight or maybe even earlier, maybe a little celebration now that you've got rid of me. I've always been the sunspot in your life ever since you got here. Not AM, but me. _You are my sunspot, my little sunspot,_ how's that for you? And to everyone else too, they all wish that I'd disintegrated in a nuclear blast or died riddled through with burns and tumors in a crowded hospital as all the doctors and nurses who were falling apart themselves went through the last pathetic motions and routines of humanity, wiping off a syringe with a cotton ball and discovering a huge piece of the skin on your hand has been wiped off with it, shriveled up and turning bruise-black. 

It would've been better that way for everyone including me, but I guess that was AM's point wasn't it?

A long long time ago, I woke up before Mira did. This was before we moved in together. It almost never happened, so I spent my time looking at her sleeping face, not really peaceful but tense which I only noticed after the fact. She was curled toward me like a pale question mark and she made a small jerk and a small noise as if she was poked. When she woke up a couple minutes later and stared at me with her dark blue eyes it was all at once and not gradually, and I knew something was different so I made the first step.

"What's wrong? Bad dream?"

"Kind of."

"Well, tell me about it."

"Hmm. Okay."

She snuggles up to me so that her head rests just under my outstretched arm and I feel something sick thrill through me, a power high or love I'm not too sure which is which. All I know is that I have her face, small and white, so close to me. 

"So I had a party to go to--"

"--God, Mira, even in your dreams?"

"Shut _up_ , Ted. I had a party to go to and I needed to wear this beautiful blue necklace. It was like lapis lazuli or some dream stone, I don't know, but it was beautiful. But when I was walking to the party--"

"--Walking? What happened to the Mercedes?"

"Ted, I swear."

"I'm sorry, I'll stop I swear, go on. Please."

"Okay, so I was walking and I dropped the necklace on the ground, and this raccoon or weasel-thing, it took it and scurried into its hole. I was panicking but I tried to keep it together, you know, and I found a house nearby with this man inside sitting on a rocking chair in the living room. So I ask him, hey, can you help me scare this weasel out of the hole, it stole my necklace and I need it quick to go to a party. And he's a nice guy, he says yeah sure, just wait a moment and I'll be out with my tools. Then I take out a cigarette and have a little smoke in his house. He might've not liked that because all of a sudden he's acting cold and weird and he sort of slams the door in my face."

"Asshole."

"So I walk back out again to the hole and he's there, thank god, and he has all these, like, cymbals and drums and flutes, and of course he has a net to catch the thing, and all through the afternoon we're just squatting outside both ends of the tunnel playing these instruments and the weasel doesn't come out."

"Tragic."

"Ted, let me just tell the goddamn story. After a while the man gets angry. Like, really angry. Pissed. I'm pretty sure he's suspecting that I'm lying about the weasel and I just want to see him making a fool of himself in public."

I smile at that, but I feel cold.

"Of course, I get angry too. So damn angry. I barely even understand why _he's_ angry, Chrissake, and it just escalates. And guess what happens next."

"What?"

"T'was rhetorical. But anyways, he throws me this small metal gun. A revolver. And we're both tired and dirty from a day of making noise so I'm slumped against like a barn wall and I catch the gun in my lap. And get this -- he tells me to kill myself. And the weirdest part is that I do! With no hesitation! Bam! Straight into the heart. And I swear, I feel a sharp pain where the bullet went in, and blood just starts pouring out onto my dress, and you won't believe this. 

The weasel, it gets frightened by the gunshot noise, and it _runs out of its hole and drops the goddamn necklace_."

"Wow."

"I'm never smoking weed again."

Ellen, I hope you understand why I've remembered Mira's dream for so long. Probably even she's forgotten about it. 

_ted, that's a lovely little story._

God.

_i find it funny, how pointless it is. don't you?_

Just like the human race, right AM?

\--

Another meeting at "ATOMICS" Anonymous and of course, Ellen hasn't returned for the second biweekly meeting. As expected. But there's another man this time to replace her, a thin flaxen guy called Gorrister. We're not sitting in a circle. Instead Reverend Land walks up past the pulpit to the altar as Ellen and I settle down on opposite sides of the aisle. I have a stale donut in my hand.

"What do you fear?" Reverend Land's voice reverberates through the old Catholic air. 

What do I fear? The Pilgrim, who is sitting on the last row of pews, in shadow, The Pilgrim that only I can see. He has hitched a ride here in the backseat of my car and nothing I did made him go away so I sweat freely this cold dread that wrenches my mouth shut like a vice, like thumbscrews. Gorrister raises his hand and I notice that his ring finger is missing.

"That the world will end."

I can't help but laugh at that, scoff secretly to myself. I'm not even sure why I come to these meetings at all. Maybe its because I feel bad for Reverend Land who's lived alone for most of his long pitiful life and sated his loneliness through literal constant chainsmoking and still God hasn't seen it fit to put him out of his misery with the lung cancer he deserves. He was an old friend of my mom and when I was a child he would come over and visit and play guitar. He only knew how to play Amazing Grace and he would sing it over and over again while the Alzheimer's in my father's brain incubated slowly but surely until it would hatch and kill him. At that point the smoking had granted the Reverend's voice an almost pleasant grunge texture but now he spoke with all the grace of broken glass. Brittle, low on the Mohs scale.

"--That's raw power. To be able to make people believe whatever they want them to." The reverend wipes his nicotine-stained mouth with his nicotine-stained hand. 

Damn. I've zoned out again. 

Gorrister responds, "this is the worst support group I've ever been to. In my life. Where's the _support_? The anti-war protests? Action?" 

"Oh come on, even a _dog_ knows when it's lost. Even _mice_ know when to finally give it up." Whatever dark childlike irony I derived from this suddenly metamorphoses into anger.

"We're _humans_ , just in case you didn't know. Not dogs, not mice."

"Well then I'd like to invite you to go outside to your riots and marches when the goddamn Tsar Bomba explodes over all the cities. Reduced to goddamn nuclear dust, all those signs and tents sure did a hell of a lot, right?" Truth is, I'm not really angry at Gorrister. I'm angry at my powerlessness over everything, not only the war but also over my own life. But Gorrister doesn't know this and he cuts into me with his acidic voice. That pH level must be in the negatives. Put a litmus paper into his mouth and it'll come away a preternatural red. 

"I'm sure you make a lot of friends, talking like that. Hell, why do we even try to live at all? According to you we all die anyways. So why do anything?"

If I only asked a little more calmly _how are you doing_ then I would've found out that Gorrister had his own Pilgrim too, same as me and Ellen. I would've found out that his wife died recently and that he had nothing left to do but to throw himself into his work as a technical writer for American Airlines, and that his boss wasn't his boss but actually The Pilgrim, AM, cogito ergo sum, etc… Gorrister and his little union didn’t have a chance against AM but he didn’t know it then, he fought and fought and lived out his days in courthouses as his wife made dinner and as that dinner cooled on the empty table in the unlit living room waiting to be eaten. In the end reading Marx had only led to ice-cold casserole and hours spent on a game of tug of war that he would never ever win.

I find it kind of funny how I’d had that brush with Gorrister just a few months before international nuclear war. He didn’t recognize me when we were shuttled down into AM’s womb but when he looks at me I feel as if there’s a dim spark going off in his eyes, he can’t quite put his finger on who I am, or he can’t be bothered to. Knowing him it’s probably the latter. I don’t know if I’m going to ever tell him. 

When I get back home Mira isn't there. She hasn't even bothered to write anything up on a post-it note. A small box full of clutter sits right next to the doormat and I'm so tired that I can't even think much of it. 

I drag a frozen microwave dinner out of the fridge and settle in. Our TV is a quaint little Toshiba, 27 inches across, an ugly lackluster gray. The screen is full of warped interference but I can make out enough of it to see that the talking heads are going on about nuclear war again. On every news channel, people can't stop talking about it, debating it. Like some frantic kid who's so certain that if they keep rambling on about ghosts, maybe they'll be able to convince themselves that they aren't pissing their pants. All I see are a bunch of freaks who might as well be wearing tinfoil hats and orthodontic headgear.

"This fear-mongering needs to stop." some guy in glasses says.

"But there's real danger out there. How can we keep every American citizen in the dark?" A woman with a severe haircut responds. 

"Look. If the end of the world is coming anyway, why shouldn't we spend our last days with our families? Our colleagues? Doing meaningful work? Or would you rather we all cower in our homes until everything falls apart?"

The woman turns to the camera as if exasperated, but her gaze bores into me. It only lasts for a split second before she turns back, a sardonic smile on her face.

"The last thing I see before I die might just be a budget spreadsheet. That really sounds super, Ted."

I nearly have a heart attack before I remember the man's name -- on the screen, TED FORSTER is briefly emblazoned in white. He's supposed to be one of the leading pundits in Sino-American relations but on the shitty Toshiba he's just another pixelated fool. 

When Mira finally gets home at around one in the morning, if the clock is to be trusted, I hug her and kiss her on the forehead. For the first time in a long time, she doesn't strain away or brush me off. Her black wool coat smells like winter air and I thumb her cold ears. She looks up at me, her eyes in total shadow. 

"I'm leaving, Ted. I'm going to be gone for a long while."

The box by the doormat. Everything hits me all at once. Ice rattles through me. I'm empty. I'm freezing. The inevitable has caught me in its headlights, finally, and I can't do much more than stand there as its grille slams into me. My dad had hit a deer once when we were going down a wooded road somewhere in New Jersey. It was nighttime so everything was either over-exposed white from our car headlights or pitch black. The car jerked forwards. A small thump. When we got out to see what happened, there was blood and fur smeared on the front bumper, and I remember trying to get the fur off, tugging at it. Somehow it'd become stuck in the metal.

"Ted? I said I'm leaving."

"Oh. Um. When are you coming back?"

She smiles but I can tell she's irritated because of the eyelid twitch. She'd been saving up money to fix that tic with some Botox. "Don't count on it."

My torso hurts. My appendix. That can't be right, because just a couple days ago I'd got it taken out of me.


End file.
